Monday, January 09, 2017

I can see why it would be hard to stay Mormon these days.
LDS leaders can no longer maintain or indiscriminately promote their carefully
manicured image of the church.Joseph Smith looks less
prophet-like with every new disclosure.They
have now made Brigham
Young the scapegoat for decades of racist teachings and practices. The
lies, deception and cover-ups of other LDS leaders involved with polygamy are
an Internet search away. Even current
LDS Apostle Jeffrey R
Holland is shown to have deliberately misled students at Harvard.

Yet what is sad is the response of some LDS faithful who
choose to stay. Rather than being grateful for their brothers and sisters who
transition to other churches of historical Christianity, there seems to be a concerted
effort to smear any spiritual alternative to their own Mormon faith. In doing so they appear willing to ignore
facts and perpetuate falsehood if this will bolster the image of the Mormon
Church.

One example is a recent error-filled blog post titled “The
Alarming Truth Behind Anti-Mormonism.” Posted on Jan 2, 2017 by Dustin Phelps, in just
a matter of days it had been shared over 30k times.

Phelps states his purpose upfront: “to expose what
anti-Mormonism is and what its objectives really are.”How much does he get right? Sadly, very little.On closer examination the ‘Alarming Truths’
proposed by Phelps turn out to be little more than sad and quite misleading
falsehoods.

Sad Falsehood #1:
There is only one credible alternative to the Restored Gospel – and that
alternative is Atheism

Despite how much LDS people want to be accepted as 'fellow Christians" by non-Mormons, Phelps appears unwilling to share the Christian label with anyone who chooses to leave the LDS fold. For the Mormon religion there are only two
churches, - itself (the one true church, the church of the Lamb), and the
church of the devil (1 Nephi 14:10).

Phelps builds on the Mormon church’s own foundational
presupposition that it is the only valid spiritual game in town, and makes
several jarringly false statements about why it’s “simply impossible to leave
the Restored Gospel for another version of Christianity without realizing you
have lost so many of its essential elements.”Could it be that Phelps realizes that if
Joseph was a false prophet then nothing unique to Mormonism is necessarily true?
Is this why he responds to criticism of Mormonism by attacking historic Christianity
and its Scriptures?He states:

basically every reason to doubt
Mormonism is a good reason to doubt Christianity. Not enough archaeological
evidence of the Book of Mormon? Feel like some of the archaeological evidence
might contradict the Book of Mormon? The same is true of the Bible.

This is false and simply a smokescreen to hide the evidence.

The general archaeological reliability of the Bible is
well-established and has been for centuries. For specific examples and quotes from renown
archaeologists see
this article. In contrast, the glaring lack of credible Book of Mormon
archaeology is amply
documented.

Next Phelps addresses another main reason Mormons are
questioning their religious system – Joseph’s polygamy:

Joseph Smith offends Western
sensibility? Not nearly as badly as prophets such as Noah, Abraham, Moses, and
Joshua. A quick gander at the Old Testament shows that Joseph Smith has a
relatively immaculate record (based on Western standards) compared to many of
the prophets who came before him.

Again, an audaciously
false statement in light of the historical facts.

The moral failures of biblical personages are portrayed as
exactly that – moral failures with often far-reaching consequences, and when David,
for example is confronted with his adultery and murder, he immediately repents
and turns from his sin.Joseph Smith, on
the other hand, sins repeatedly, lies about it, attempts to cover it up and
hide it and never repents. Meanwhile,
leaders of the LDS church have done all they can to hide, minimize and excuse
his behavior. The LDS church cannot have it both ways. Either everything Joseph
said and did regarding his multiple wives and the stories he told them to
convince them to go along with his advances were true or they were not. Either
Joseph was simply and obediently reinstating and following the Old Testament
pattern of polygamy per God’s command (which always involved physically
consummating the relationship – what was the point otherwise), or he was lying
about it and manipulating teenage girls and other men’s wives, and God had
nothing to do with it. As Dr. Rob Bowman has amply documented in his extensive
response to this same article, Joseph’s
polygamy little resembles the polygamy of the OT.

So it is sheer nonsense to assert as Dustin Phelps does
that: “And so we find that arguments
against Joseph Smith are really arguments against all the prophets”.

There are numerous and well-documented reasons why the most
logical conclusion in light of what we know of Joseph’s life and character is
that he
should not be accepted as a true prophet of God – none of which apply to
the prophets and apostles of the Bible.Phelps is dodging the real issues and problems with Joseph’s conduct and
misdirecting his fellow LDS members with false information and false
affirmations.

Sad Falsehood #2:
Anti-Mormonism isn’t just about getting people to lose faith in our Church,
it’s about getting people to lose faith in God, in Christ, in revelation, in
religion.

This is as shameful as
it is sad as it is false.

For many former Mormons and outreach ministries the goal in
exposing the lies, deceit and false teachings of Mormonism is all about helping
people find the truth – the very thing Jesus said would set them free. There
are thousands of people who have turned from LDS religion to a personal
relationship with Jesus Christ, who love their Heavenly Father more than ever,
who are receiving revelation in the form of daily guidance from the Word of
God, the Holy Spirit of God and the people of God.

They have realized that the external ‘goodness’ and ‘niceness’
of being Mormon (and LDS people can be some of the kindest, nicest and
sincerest people you will ever meet) will never remove the guilt, pressure and
ongoing sense of failure they feel when they are honest about how far short
they fall of God’s standard of perfect holiness.Many former Mormons have realized that if
grace is only going to come “after all they can do” they will never get grace,
because no one, anywhere, at any time has ever done ‘all they can do.’So instead they have repented of trying to
earn God’s favor, of working to achieve worthiness, and in humble gratitude
have accepted the double-transfer Jesus died to offer – all their sin, guilt,
failure and falling short are exchanged for Jesus’ perfect righteousness, his
absolute holiness and his totally measuring up to the Father’s standard of
perfection.

The result is a confident and close relationship with God
built on faith and trust in Him, more gratitude in life, more intimacy with
Jesus Christ and more acts of service done from a grateful heart of love in
response to the great gift of grace and mercy they’ve been given. Hardly the atheism in any of its facets portrayed by Phelps.

Yes, it is true that way too many LDS people when learning
the truth about their religion move toward atheism and agnosticism.But their choice to ignore God and his son
Jesus Christ does not make Mormonism true anymore than an abused woman’s choice
to ignore good counsel and get drunk or high now means her abuser is a man of
love and integrity. A bad response to a
bad situation does not turn the bad situation good.

I would like to suggest that so many former LDS people turn
to "atheism” rather than to Jesus Christ himself because they have been
part of a system that creates practical atheists.It’s not they don’t believe there is a God,
but even as they live as “good Mormons” they’ve never turned to Christ alone
for the answer to their sin problem, nor sought to trust God alone for their
spiritual needs.

So many LDS people today have a testimony of Joseph Smith
and the Book of Mormon and of their own good works and a sense of pride at all
they are doing to get mercy they've earned, and grace that comes after all they
can do. But they have never come broken and empty handed, drawn by the Holy
Spirit of God to true faith and repentance, trusting in Christ alone to reconcile
them to God the Father as the one and only God who has existed or ever will
exist.

Mormonism’s appeal is an appeal to the prideful flesh of
man, adding his own work to the work of Christ, pulling himself up by his own
bootstraps. Such appeals will never bring about the brokenness and humility and
stark recognition of our sinfulness in the presence of an absolutely Holy God
who cannot tolerate even the least amount of sin.

So when religious, prideful, self-confident people find:

a) Their religious source of information to be unreliable
(as has happened in the wake of the 13 Church essays finally admitting what
critics of Joseph and the Mormon system have been decrying for decades)

b) Their 'spiritual' leaders from Joseph Smith on are little
more than savvy, at times dishonest business men and politicians who strive to
make good PR-based decisions to keep a religious corporation growing, and

c) Their temple ceremonies that have cost them 10% of their
income have more to do with freemasonry and occultism than revelation from God,
it is not surprising they would continue to do what they have been doing –
rejecting the grace of God and living independent, self-confident lives.

Now they are simply doing it without the religious trappings
and social pressure to conform to the religious system called Mormonism – which
is in some ways has helped prepare them for atheism.Think about it – there is no ultimate
transcendent God in Mormonism. There is
no one single Being who is the First and Primary cause to Whom everyone and
everything in the cosmos is subject. Instead, the Mormon God is one of an endless progression of
glorified men (and women), working their way to a divine state in order to
create more humans who can likewise progress and continue the cycle. Even the atonement of Jesus Christ in Mormonism guarantees nothing but a physical resurrection - and everyone gets that regardless of whether they had faith in Christ or outright rejected him.

One more really sad
thing

A final, telling aspect of this popular LDS blog is that it
reveals a sad facet of Mormon culture. A significant segment of the Mormon
religion is comprised of people who will share and promote information that, at
some level, they probably know or at least sense is wrong.Yet because it is ‘faith-promoting’ and
reinforces “I-am-in-the-only-true-church” and distracts them from the internal
unease caused by disturbing facts, they will circulate it amongst themselves.
In so doing they assuredly proclaim to one another the beauty of the emperor’s
new wardrobe while he parades naked and exposed through town. How much better to break with the crowd and
courageously embrace the truth that God has indeed spoken through his prophets
and apostles. To see that in so doing God has showed us how to spot prophetic imposters
like Joseph Smith, something LDS leaders themselves acknowledge. Maybe it’s not so much about being “anti-Mormon”
as it is being pro-freedom and pro-truth.